


sleep wisely for the devils

by fated_addiction



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:38:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fated_addiction/pseuds/fated_addiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione never did wear her mother's shoes. Rose will never find her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sleep wisely for the devils

“Five hundred words,” she says to Rose, and they are in the kitchen, again, with the high sun planted against the window. Fall is crawling into the trees too; there are roses, Molly’s roses, and a patch of things that her own mother likes to think are about her and so, at the very, least, there is that. Colors are colors and they will be dead soon too.

“Do you need it now?” she asks her daughter.

Rose frowns into her curls. They are not startled by the loud slam behind them. There is Ron’s voice. There is Hugo’s voice. Harry’s amusement sneaks and simpers in. The others arrive at three or half-past.

“Summer assignment, mum,” she says seriously. Hermione touches a drawer.

“Summer assignment,” she repeats.

Rose sighs loudly. The corners of Hermione’s mouth tug. It’s heavy.

Ron laughs.

“Ask me the question again,” Hermione tells her gently. There is no poignant way to say this. She opens the drawer. It shuts quietly.

Hugo’s made an ashtray. Years ago. But it was meant to be a bowl. She cannot remember if her mother was the one that took her sun into some strange form of summer camp. There was a time. That time is gone; the distance between her parents and her family now is all but a dull hum. Summer camp and bowls and pottery – all of that, it was just a relapse.

She fingers the astray. Her nails click and catch. There is a crack spreading over the palm of the tray.

“What do you remember?” Rose asks.

Hermione faces her reflection in the window.

 

 

 

Seamus is drunk. Hermione still feels like she is picking branches out from under the cuffs of her sleeves, even though her gown is sleeveless and there’s a strange little tear at her hip. No one will notice. Half the ball is drunk. The roof of her mouth is starting to taste like ash.

“Tell me, little _love_ ,” he slurs, and she promptly ignores, half into amusement, half into patting his shoulder as she passes into the gardens, or what were the gardens. Instead it’s cool air, and the sweet, slickness of summer and fall and _winter_ that walk what’s left of the student body into rubble.

There are no more bodies as it is. She knows this much: Ron and Lavender are drunk on the third floor, Ginny is speaking to Neville not Harry, and she is sure, so sure that for the thirty-seventh time Harry is explaining why he is not going straight into training for _this_ instead of that.

Outside, the air remains sticky. It climbs against her dress.

Her cigarette falls into her palm.

“Terrible habit.”

Her cigarette pulls between her fingers. Next, it’s her mouth.

“Mmm,” she says. The music starts again, loudly. Professors and Ministry attendants alike are inside. The phrase is the same: _kids are kids_. Her lips wrap around the cigarette, her teeth pressing against he paper. “No one knows,” she offers. “Except you,” she says too.

Harry steps next to her. She listens to him sink into the grass. His boots scuffs and shuttle into resting. “You don’t do it around me,” he says.

Her mouth twitches. “You’re not fast enough.”

She smells the air. It remains smokeless. There are fingers in her wrist.

Harry’s thumb flicks against her palm.

“I hate games, Hermione,” he says.

Her eyes are half-closed. 

 

 

 

Rose’s hair curl at her chin.

“Why didn’t you ever –”

“I’m not good with the spotlight,” she tells her daughter. This is true. This will remain true for a very long time.

Rose smiles though. The quill bites into her notes.

“But,” she starts, and her eyes are Ron’s.

Hermione’s fingers dust into the drawer again.

“But,” she continues and thinks _for my daughter_. “But everyone remembers it all differently,” she finishes. “Not one person’s story is the same – sensational or otherwise, little love. I don’t even really understand all the things that I saw. I can talk to you in facts, but then most of the time, I feel like –”

She stops and catches herself. She turns though, leaning against the kitchen sink. Rose keeps her chin on her elbows and palm.

“ _But_ ,” she presses.

Hermione pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I’m very tired, little love,” she says.

 

 

 

This is abrupt –

what you don’t know is complicated, not because it chooses to be complicated, but because it’s complicated, exhaustingly complicated enough to drag her head back into the woods, back into when and where it was cold and hungry, climbing into her jumpers, against her skin and nails, and oh you should really watch your perfume, this is not a good idea

\- but to get from a to c, you need to understand the virtues of what remains the in between. Hermione will, in the coming years, say a lot of: ask yourself _this_ not to be poignant or to make a point or even avoid the questions that are waiting to be answered. What you won’t know is this:

how she sat in the grass

or

why Harry lit her cigarette, and why his eyes are drawn to the waif of smoke, shuddering between them, over the music that is starting to die again

or why, for a moment, they’ll watch Seamus and Luna drift and disappear off into the back, Dean trailing along with pocketed hands and a drunk, distant smile and Hermione will feel very tired and Harry will lean in close, open-mouthed against arch of her shoulder.

It doesn’t matter how long they have been sitting here.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks.

She looks down. The cigarette is loose in her mouth.

“No,” she says quietly.

He laughs. The sound breaks. She thinks about swallowing and tents. Her dress is wet.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t want you to,” she says.

“I know.”

“Do _you_?” she counters.

“Five hundred words and no comment,” he says idly, and there’s another laugh, harder, the sound sinks too. He drops back against the grass, still full of awkward limbs and elbows. “That’s my first post-war article.”

“I can read, Harry.” Her voice is dry. “Well done.”

She thinks:

There is a scar at my belly, and at my throat, there is one across my back, just jutting into my spine, and bruises, so many _bruise_ everywhere but there is a place for everything and everything has a place – these are the things that she would never say because all the questions directed towards her will be a variation on a scheme.

As a Muggleborn – 

_the_ Muggleborn

and how do you feel about family one, two, three and _four_ and their Marks –

“I miss the tent,” she answers. She stares at her forearm and squints. She bites at the cigarette, blinking. “Does that make me odd?”

“Trauma,” Harry answers back. His neck cracks when he turns it. “That’s what they were – _are_ ,” he corrects himself, “saying to everyone.”

Hermione nods. Her hair is starting to unravel against her back and neck.

“My mum and dad have decided on a break.”

“With each other?” he asks.

Hermione doesn’t answer.

He stretches into the grass too. Her fingers jerk into her knees. She pulls her gown up and over. It slides to rest against her thighs. She feels wet against her back, but she won’t lie back, not into this grass. Somewhere there is still stone.

And she has the option, she knows, to go straight back to school, or to go straight back into the Ministry and become the poster child for some sort of long, dull example into relationships and politics. She doesn’t smile often enough. Ron is the most charming out of the three of them.

“You’ll say yes, of course,” Harry tells her.

“Of course,” she echoes.

She puts her cigarette out. But not hard enough – Harry takes that and the ash and it slides into his mouth.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says.

Her lips twitch again.

 

 

 

Perhaps their children are meant to ask –

do mum and dad love each other?

\- and really, _really_ Ron is so much better at this question, with foreheads and kisses and easy, lazy tuck-ins at nine and eleven, and honestly, Rosie, your mum is going to kick me in the face if you don’t go off and _rest_.

Rose does not ask any of this yet.

“Do you miss it?”

There is that instead.

 

 

 

“Five hundred _words_ ,” she croaks, and his mouth is biting at her throat, as his fingers start to sink into the space underneath her knickers, and it’s not just her knickers, it’s Rose’s parchment left, full, resting over the counter behind her as Hermione keeps the glass and the window and her reflection.

Harry’s laugh remains a surprise.

“Five hundred words – ” he breathes and sighs “ – I read,” he adds. “You and words, I reckon I still envy what you know how to say.”

“It’s a stress you don’t need,” she murmurs.

There, _oh okay_ there, his fingers push between the lips and then they are sinking inside of her cunt, the pad of his thumb at her clit. He rubs. She jerks and swallows, her head, dropping back against his shoulder.

“I’m at the Ministry right now –”

“It’s a Weasley tradition,” she says, his fingers curling in her. Her voice cracks high. She is aware of the smaller things: his nails as they pull at her insides, the flick of wetness that starts to rest and seep into her skin. He’ll smell like her. 

His teeth pick at her lobe, flushed against the back of her ear.

“What did you say?” he asks.

There are multiple ways this will end. She comes. She always comes. Here in the kitchen. Against the stairs. Over the table, her desks, into the walls and in between the grass, like that day, those weeks, where it was just her and him, the windows and the way season began to bleed into each other.

How they swing back is not important. But oh, oh oops there goes Rose’s quill and Rose’s parchment and another pack of cigarettes with a frank discovery will rest in the trash as her daughter and her husband and her son will look at her and wait and know she is back into disappearing into her mind again. You can know that this happens a lot. You can know that this happens in many different ways to many different people and this is Harry and this is Hermione and she will dream about the rest of her life and how for that split, _split_ second she thought about not coming back.

But she tells him, voice soft, teeth in his fingers as she swallows herself later.

“I came back.”

 

 

 

Rose looks ready to cry.

The first letter of the year will open and she smells the smoke.

Ron sends money for more parchment.

Routines, you know.


End file.
